Atlassian Crowd

[Pangianto Pang]

Hi can anyone explain how atlassian crowd work?

i have been reading its documentation but i am still not clear.

isit able to pick up combination username and password from another place? and how they can be given access right in JIRA and Confluence?

Thanks in advance.

[Harry Chan]

You can use Atlassian Crowd to delegate user directories / user management for other Atlassian products, e.g. JIRA and Confluence. Atlassian Crowd is also able to provide SSO.

It's also useful when you have large number of users in LDAP, etc as it provides better performance than say using JIRA's user management.

[Pangianto Pang]

My company has its own user directory (username and password), is crowd able to use my company user directory?

If it is possible, then how can it be done?

[Pangianto Pang]

or is it possible to connect my Company user directory without using Crowd?

[Harry Chan]

You can do all of that. If you have LDAP - e.g. eDirectory or AD you cannot them directly to the applications. It just won't have SSO and enterprise caching solution.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

That's rather a vague question, to which the answer really is "where are you stuck in the documentation"?

[Pangianto Pang]

i do not get how crowd is working:

1. why is it a web application like JIRA / Confluence? how JIRA can be configured to use crowd?

2. why does it need a database? im planning to use crowd to use user directory of my Company, so how will the database records like?

3. how are JIRA group and user permission controlled by using crowd?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Crowd is a way of providing a list of users to an application.

Many applications need a list of users, with their passwords. By default, most applications will come with a way to maintain that list for themselves, internally.

Crowd provides a single place to do that - instead of someone having a login for Jira, another for Confluence, another for MyWebApp etc, you tell them all to look at Crowd for their user data. Crowd holds one record per user. It can then enable SSO (I log into Jira, and Crowd knows I've done that, so I can go to Confluence and all the others without needing to login to them separately). It can hold other data for the user as well, such as what groups they are in.

Crowd can hold the data inside itself, or it can read other user databases - like LDAP. LDAP can also hold username/passwords, but it's not great at groups (Crowd can do things like make Group1 available in App 1, but not App2. LDAP is flatter than that), and it doesn't really do seamless SSO (You usually get some annoying "log into this portal first" box, rather than simply logging straight into an application).

Jira will read it's group memberships from Crowd, but the permissions are still handled within Jira itself.